According to the Star Tribune, Starbucks recently decided to resurrect its original bare-breasted mermaid logo, much to the dismay of the Christian group, “The Resistance,” who is calling for a national boycott. The logo, based on a 16th Century Norse woodcut, will be on Starbucks cups for at least a few more weeks and will be the permanent logo for Pike Place bags of coffee. According to the Christian group, the logo “has a naked woman on it with her legs spread like a prostitute,” and that “the company might as well call themselves Slutbucks.” We didn’t even know that mermaids had legs. More, inside…

Better not use a green circle for your coffee shop logo because Starbucks has lawyers and they’ll sue ya. Conga Coffee & Tea, a small two-store operation in Michigan, is being threatened with a lawsuit because their logo bears “striking resemblance” to Starbucks’ famous mermaid logo. At least that’s what Starbucks says.

A reader at Neatorama reveals the dark Masonic secret of the Toblerone logo: a hidden bear! If you look closely at the mountain that’s on every bar of Toblerone chocolate, you can see a bear standing on his hind legs. It also looks like there’s a goldfish cracker near the base of the mountain, but that might just be because we’re hungry. [Neatorama]

We received a response tonight to the inquiry we sent Purina on 4/09/07 asking if there was any truth to the rumors (which we spread) that the recurrent “Woman And Kitty” imagery that bedecks numbers of their pet food packages seemed to recall, if not draw directly from, the “Madonna And Child” motif (undoubtedly to serve manipulative marketing ends).

As we mentioned last week, the packaging on several kinds of Purina cat chow feature pictures that seem to be influenced by the Madonna and Child motif. To get to the bottom of the mystery, we sent Purina this letter:

One thing it doesn’t show is that it’s a good idea to cover up the rest of the phone in tape so you don’t get sugar in your keypad or elsewhere. Also, be gentle and patient. Press too hard and you could scratch the phone. — BEN POPKEN

We haven’t tried this, but if you’re sick of having a logo on your cell phone, you can try to remove it with sugar. Warning: You might mess up your phone. That being said, go for it. They don’t own you! From Instructables:

The key is to scratch of the logo without leaving and marks on the surface of the phone (in my case PDA). Sugar works perfectly.

Thank god for small favors, “KFC” is back to Kentucky Fried Chicken after over a decade of trying to make us forget the “fried” part. Or, come to think of it, maybe it was the “Kentucky” they were worried about. Anyway, it’s back, and the Colonel himself has undergone a bit of a redesign. He now sports an apron, which is a nice touch.